1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for musical instrument education, and particularly to systems and methods for teaching students musical instrument skills without requiring a human tutor.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Musical instrument education is an important aspect in many societies. Although particularly common for parents to arrange their children to learn the skills of playing musical instruments, musical instrument education is not limited to a certain age group. There are a variety of ways for people to receive musical instrument education. Many schools offer musical instrument courses to teach students how to play a musical instrument. Specialty musical education schools also exist to train people on their skills to play musical instruments. In addition, people also learn how to play musical instruments through home schooling and individual tutoring.
According to the conventional methods for musical instrument education, typically a human tutor (or instructor) is involved. The student, and sometimes an accompanying person (often a parent if the student is a child), needs to commute to the location of the tutor or to where the teaching facility and musical instruments are provided. Alternatively, the tutor commutes to the location of the student. The cost is often high due to involvement of a paid tutor, expensive instruments and teaching facilities. Commuting not only incurs further expenses, but also can be difficult to do and time-consuming. In addition, lessons usually have fixed time schedules and may be difficult to arrange.
Remote education or learning by correspondence alleviates the above problems to a certain extent. However, many problems still exist. A human tutor or evaluator is still required. Remote education also creates its own problems. The student needs to mail recorded materials on a recording medium to the tutor or the evaluator for evaluation. After finishing evaluation, the tutor or the evaluator then needs to send the evaluation and instructions to the student. The process is indirect and can be slow.
The use of the Internet further helps to solve some of the problems. For example, instead of mailing materials recorded on a recording medium to the tutor, the student can record his or her performance musical data in a digital format and send it over to the tutor electronically. The tutor can also reply to the student electronically. Nevertheless, the process still requires a human tutor. The particular manners in which the existing musical instrument education systems and methods transmit electronic musical data also bring their own problems. For example, if the student uses a conventional musical instrument, the student will need to record his or her performance in a proper digital format that can be transmitted to the tutor. The digital files must also be readable by the tutor. Such recordings may not only be time consuming but also technologically challenging for many people. Furthermore, performance musical data tends to have large file sizes that can make data transmission slow and occupy large portions of bandwidth of the Internet connection. Especially, which limitations may make it difficult or impossible to have highly interactive training sessions which require frequent and quick performance-evaluation cycles.
It has also been proposed to use a computerized musical performance teaching system. One example is found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,072,113. These computerized performance teaching systems address some of the above problems but still leave much to be desired.